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NASA's Orion Mock-Up Fails Parachute Test
leetrout writes "Fox News has the story on a parachute test failing on a mock up of the new Orion spacecraft. 'This is the most complicated parachute test NASA has run since the '60s,' said Carol Evans, test manager for the parachute system at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'We are taking a close look at what caused the set-up chutes to malfunction. A failure of set-up parachutes is actually one of the most common occurrences in this sort of test.' Space.com has the video."
...parachute tests fail all the time. That's why they are tested. These aren't parachutes from Lucky's Parachute and Bait Shop for chrissake. They are custom designed and often cutting edge.
The documents and egineering notes from Apollo are both available and useless. I really wish the urban legend would die. Do you seriously imagine that we need to "relearn" how to make parachutes for fucks sake? Please stop parroting this BS.
We're not doing things the way we did in the 60s for the simple reason that we know much better ways of doing things. Any large-scale engineering effort will run into significant problems here or there, and the problems are rarely tied to the underlying technology. Sometimes a supplier tries to get away with being cheap, and fails. Sometimes the written procedures are ambiguous in ways only obvious in hindsight. Sometime shit just goes wrong! There are always corner cases specific to a given complicated assemby of complicated pieces that you only find by testing.
That's why engineers do testing. To find these problems.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You should, instead, lament the fact that The Reagan administration got rid of practically all of the corporate knowledge base as NASA in hopes of reducing the number of civil servants in favor of contractors they felt they could simply scale up and down as needed. The actual effect was to push out anyone capable of holding their own in the private marketplace. Some stayed at contractors for a while, while others simply left for other lines of work. Those at contractors stayed until the work dried up, and were then laid off by said contractors. At that point, they went to find jobs elsewhere.
When NASA needed to staff up for anything, the contractors were paid to go hire people. The problem is that they went and hired younger, cheaper engineers with no experience in spaceflight. The kind of work NASA does is, for the most part, pretty specialized. Many NASA engineers can find work in other industries and be productive fairly quickly because they (a) have core competency in very custom work and (b) industry has an old guard to give them the specific training in the new specialty. Conversely, bringing in an average engineer with "pick it out of a book" mentality is going to take forever to relearn the advanced basics (I call them that - it's the 4000/5000/6000 level stuff you learn in college; not hard, per say, but complex and _not_ part of a typical engineer's day to day life). Couple that with practically _no_ old guard to teach them the intricacies and anomalies of spaceflight work and you've destined to have a slow, painful, and failure-rich engineering process.
While the "how" is written down many places, the "why" isn't as apparent from a stack of prints. And though there are huge books of "lessons learned" on many projects, it's not easy to capture decades of experience and apply them real time given the capacity of individual human brains. What they need is continuity, not librarians.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?